Chapter 1. A primer on design industry terminology

It’s easy to think of design as how things look. Fonts, colours, textures, grids, mood boards – that sort of thing. This is graphic design: it’s still important in its own way, but it’s now just a small part of what the digital design industry has become.

Today, design is far less about how you decorate things, and far more about how you persuade and influence people into doing things. It’s mainly about tracking, testing, psychology, behavioural economics, statistics and empirical scientific research. In other words, it’s all about achieving business goals and making money.

You might not realise it, but when you use popular apps or websites, the details of everything you click on and scroll through usually gets recorded. Then it gets analysed, carefully. In big companies like Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Google, they have teams of people paid six-figure salaries, tasked to work out how to make more money out of you. Every day, your behaviour is tracked and you take part in quantitative research (e.g. ‘A/B tests’ or ‘multivariate tests’) to work out what will make you click, buy or agree to the legal terms. It’s important to understand that the same research methodologies can be used to help or harm users. It depends on the intent of the business owner. It just so happens that deceptive patterns are easy to build and deliver measurable outcomes, so deception is commonplace unless a business owner takes a strong position on preventing it from happening.

Deceptive patterns aren’t always the result of rigorous research and careful craftsmanship – sometimes they’re just profitable accidents. Consider the example of a subscription offer that doesn’t clearly explain the nature of the ongoing charges, just because the writer didn’t take due care. This might result in a surge of revenue, which the business may then come to rely on, and they may not even understand why.

I’m going to use some industry terms in this book, so I’ll define them here.

Product

This is the general term that’s used to refer to an app or a website or any other piece of software that people use. The Amazon app is a product. So is the Facebook website. You get the general idea. Sometimes companies prefer to refer to their business as offering a ‘service’, particularly if it involves customers interacting with different people and numerous touchpoints over a period of time.

Product managers

In most modern organisations, a single individual is directly responsible for all of the decision-making for a given product or feature. This person is known as the product manager (PM). They’re usually like a mini CEO, responsible for everything within the realm assigned to them, though the exact title and job description varies. If a deceptive pattern is created, then the PM of that product should know about it. They should know why it’s been created, what purpose it serves, how many users interact with it and how it makes money. This is handy to know if you’re ever involved in choosing who to subpoena in a class action lawsuit.

Users

A user is the category of person for whom the product is intended, rather than ‘all humans on the planet’. In the industry, we sometimes say active users for people who regularly use a product, and target users to include those for whom it is intended, but who might not be using it yet. The terms ‘monthly active users’ (MAU) and ‘daily active users’ (DAU) are also commonly used when measuring the success of a product, and deceptive patterns are often used to boost these numbers.

User interface design

An interface is the point at which two things meet and interact. If you glue two pieces of wood together, the glue is the interface. In this case, instead of having two pieces of wood, you have a product and a user. The glue in the middle is the user interface (UI). With a screen-based device, we’re mainly talking about text, images, boxes and buttons: these components make up the user interface. With a voice-oriented device, like an Amazon Echo, the user interface is the words or audio that comes out of its speaker, and the commands it recognises when you speak into its microphone.

User experience design

A user experience (UX) is what you perceive or feel when you interact with a product’s user interface over a period of time. If the interface is hard to use, then you’ll have a negative experience.

However, not all user experiences have the same strategic goals. For example, when you pay for something online, you want the checkout to be pain-free and quick. Most form-filling experiences are like this – you don’t want it to be fun, you want it to be done. In this context, usability and efficiency are paramount. Conversely, when you switch on a Nintendo or put on an Oculus headset, you want to savour every moment of the experience. In this context, emotions and entertainment matter.

Of course, there are many other kinds of human endeavour that need different design considerations. If you’re designing an educational product, you need to understand how people learn. If you’re designing the controls for an X-ray machine, safety is one of your biggest concerns. The list goes on and on. It’s the job of a UX designer to think about these things. A UX designer takes a business’s goals and marries them up with an understanding of user needs and user psychology. UX designers typically create sketches, diagrams and models – things that help with thinking and collaboration, forming a bridge between the people in the different roles in their team: product managers, researchers, technical subject matter experts and UI designers.

Unfortunately, the design industry has very few universally recognised certifications, or universally defined job titles, roles and responsibilities. Each company tends to use slightly different terminology and processes.

Alternative terms for deceptive patterns

Although the term dark pattern is still in use by some people, we should aim to phase it out and use more inclusive terminology that avoids negative associations. My preferred term is deceptive pattern, although if I am working with lawyers, I use the longer term deceptive or manipulative pattern, since not all of these patterns are deceptive. Various groups around the world use different terms to mean broadly the same thing:

• harmful online choice architecture: this term is used by the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA).¹
• asshole design: a colloquial term, used on Reddit and other forums.²
• dark nudge: this term is sometimes used by behavioural economists, building on Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s term ‘nudge’.³
• sludge: a term that specifically refers to obstructive design, which Cass Sunstein has written about extensively.⁴

It is unlikely we’ll reach a universally agreed term any time soon, since this area of work now overlaps with legislation and regulation. For example, the word deceptive has a narrow technical definition in the United States at a federal level (due to the FTC Act), so the term deceptive pattern would be used very cautiously by US legal professionals (unlike in this book where I use it as a broad term).⁵ Similarly, dark pattern has recently been defined in EU law, so it will continue to be used there despite its shortcomings. My view is that if you’re not a lawyer or involved in legal systems, it’s sensible to just be clear and descriptive about the design patterns you are talking about, and accept that there may be some movement in the terminology for this stuff as time passes.